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This book is important to read, practically a MUST if you are interested in becoming a video game designer/writer. These guys really know what they're talking about, and they're wonderful authors now too. This book is really enjoyable to read too, and is even humorous.
The action items are really valuable to extending your creativity and skill for video game writing and design. If you do the action items throughout the book, like I'm doing, you'll find your video game thoughts will become ideas, and your ideas will grow more substantial as you find inspiration. This is my teen daughter's review:I've read most of this book, but even without finishing it, I've liked it a lot.
Also, the authors give you some scenarios and examples about working in a video gaming job, what problems may arise and how to overcome and work around them, how to cooperate with your team members, etc. Thank you to the authors for writing this helpful and amazing book. So far, this book isn't about the artwork so much as it is about the character, game, and story structure.
At first I picked up, thinking it would be boring and/or way over my head, but this book really shows you the ins and outs of video game writing/design, in a way that is both realistic and quite interesting.
Although it is not a programming book that teaches how to write code to build a game it gives you the foundations about what to take into account to develop this kind of applications and be successful. The book is an excellent introduction for those looking to start working in the game development field; it's also a valuable resource for those who already are.
I think a book like that should give some more information about the differences between the stages of production and some more information on the stages themselves. The hints though clever, are nothing that an able storyteller won't be able to find for himself after a good night's sleep and some creative thinking and if you don't have the latter you should not consider making video games either way. First thing I want to say about this book is that it is indeed well written, easy to understand and gives some good hints and practices for the design of a video game. Anyone interested in gaming programming will feel a bit disappointed as there is barely a mention in this book regarding it (except the occasional remark that we should consider the programming limitations when thinking of a scenario.). All in all maybe a four would also be appropriate but considering I couldn't manage to read it all ( some sections I found too boring to read ) I think for me a three would suffice. The last section also is very insightful as to how a game scenario idea should be presented ( this last part is at least worth a star out of five ). These were the pros.About the cons.
The book is chalk full of information, easy to follow, tons of useful projects for you to work through to make your game the best it can be. Also there are some typos in the text in several places, which normally would not bother me, but the actual book is pretty short, and you would expect them to have caught them. I'm taking a course for writing in multimedia in college, and my project I'm working on is designing a video game. The only things I wish this book had that could have been more complete, were actual examples of flow charts, and more in depth examples of the different types of story branching such as a parallel path. Overall, this book gets 5 stars from me because the authors have given you some amazing tips, and the book is fun to read. While the required reading was very helpful, I got this book to supplement the material. I am very satisfied with my choice.
Really interesting. I have no plans to become a game designer but found this book to be an amazing work. It gives the "big picture" - from concept to completion - of what it takes to tell and involve players in an engaging story in a video game world.
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